Ouch, my finger!

April 23, 2013|Nick Jacobs

It probably happens to everyone at least once in a lifetime. Unfortunately, it's happened to me much more often than that.

The other day one of my meetings went longer than planned, and that caused me to press pretty hard on the time envelope available for my next appointment. I had to stop at my place just long enough to pick up some paperwork; make a phone call on my cellphone, pack up my computer and literally run.

As I was pulling out of the parking garage, I realized that I hadn't picked up my phone. So, I turned around and went back to get it and saw that someone sent me a text message. As, I hurried toward the door, I tried to answer the text. Now we've all heard that a lot of people have been hurt or killed from texting while driving, but my experience was just a little different.

As I slammed the door shut, I caught the middle finger of my left hand between the door jam and the two-inch thick metal door. Remember, the operative word here is slammed. The pain was such that I just stood there, doubled over for a good three minutes before the throbbing began in earnest. Because I take aspirins, the nail and the tip of the finger both turned blue-black almost instantaneously.

Two days later I'm typing with a finger-pain that would feel so much better with a Popsicle stick splint, and I've been reminiscing about other smashed finger incidents in my life. Of course I've hit my finger with a hammer numerous times, that is, until I learned how to hold the nails in place with my comb. I've also caught it in some other doors, but the two most memorable finger smashing incidents occurred in high school and college.

It was a cool October evening filled with the smell of leaves and Halloween as Mr. Ellenberger, Bobby's dad, drove around our neighborhood to drop off the kids from band practice at their family homes. As I got out of the back seat talking, laughing, and having fun, I slammed the door... on my thumb. The door stayed shut and my thumb stayed inside the door. Mr. Ellenberger pulled out, and I started running beside the car, pounding on the window, yelling and screaming. Everyone inside was laughing and pointing at me as I tried to keep up with Mr. Ellenberger's accelerating car. They thought I was kidding around. Finally, I convinced them to stop, opened the door, and freed up my thumb.

As a college freshman, we sometimes had coordinated door slams just to make the dean in residence crazy. Since we always listened to the same radio station, it was easy for everyone to slam the door on the top of the hour beep. (Ask your grandparents what that meant.) Well, during one of those slams, my finger stayed between the jam and the door.

Because the pain and swelling was overwhelming, I went to the campus nurse the next day. She looked at my finger, heated a needle until it glowed orange hot, pushed on my fingernail, and it went through the nail in a nanosecond releasing the trapped blood from the hematoma like Old Faithful. It was surprisingly painless.

Then she started to bandage the finger and the pain put me through the roof. She smiled, looked up from the gauze and said, "I know this hurts. I'm sorry, but you see when I was in college, I skipped finger bandaging."

As I approach the age of most of the trees in Mellon Park in Pittsburgh, I wonder how many more times I'll smash my finger? I realize that in the big scheme of things, none of this matters, but, hey, it was a big hit with my grandkids, and they sure noticed my purple finger.

(Nick Jacobs, Windber, international director for SunStone Consulting, LLC is the author of the blog Healinghospitals.com.)